Born
in Washington D.C., and now living in Shanghai with his wife
and their two children, Howard French is a senior writer for
the New York Times.
After teaching at the University of Ivory Coast from
1980 to 1982, he began his freelance journalism career writing
about Africa for the Washington Post, Africa
News, The Economist and numerous other publications.
Since 1986, he has reported for the Times from Central
America, the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan, Korea
and now China where he is the Shanghai Bureau Chief. He is
the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy
and Hope of Africa (Vintage: 2005).
Mr. French was the Tokyo Bureau Chief from August 1999 to
August 2003.
Among his many awards and nominations, Mr. French won the
Overseas Press Club (OPC) of America’s award for
best newspaper interpretation of foreign affairs for his coverage
of the fall of Mobuto Sese Seko in 1997 as well as being a
finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize (1997) and the
Lettres Ulysses Prize (2004).
From 1998 to 1999, Mr. French was a visiting scholar at the
University of Hawaii, where he studied the Japanese
language, and East Asian affairs. In the spring of 1999, he
was also a Jefferson Fellow at the East-West
Center, in Honolulu. He received an honorary doctorate
from the University of Maryland in 2005. He is fluent
in French, Mandarin, Spanish and Japanese.
He gave this exclusive interview to Victor Fic, a guest interviewer
at JapanReview.Net.
Interview:
March 25, 2005
Howard, you spent a year at the East-West Center in
Hawaii preparing for your Japan posting. What course of study
did you have? Which books or commentators were best?
I made many useful
academic acquaintances in Hawaii, Victor: Edward Shultz, director
of Korean Studies, and Susan Minichiello, head of Japanese
studies were both great mentors intellectually, and have published
valuable works on their respective cultures. Danny Kwok for
Chinese studies, ditto. Dae Suk Suh, I regard, as one of the
most interesting people on the Kim Dynasty in North Korea.
I read very, very widely during this period. Hard to say what
impressed me the most. Lots of fiction, and lots of history.
(I'll send you a list separately, if you'd like.)
Many students
of Japan complain that their classroom instruction was unrealistic.
Maybe they learned that Japanese schools are the world's best,
but they find their students are quiet and conformist. Did
you reject or modify what you were taught?
I tried to reserve
judgment, actually. My first and best impressions came from
the classroom. In several classes many of my fellow students
were Japanese ryugakusei, as were my Japanese language
tutors. I learned a lot from observing and interacting.
The idea of Japan
as number one in anything, much less academia was well over
by the time I was studying for my assignment 1998-99. I was
struck, though, by the preponderantly passive way many of
my fellow students behaved in class, offering very little
of their thoughts.
You started
in Japan in the late 1990's, when Americans were in the so-called
"Japan passing" phase. Did you find the US disintersted
in Japan?
Disinterested is
perhaps too strong a word for what I found. I found the interest
to be tepid, irregular and often patronizing—both in
terms of the American policy establishment and the media establishment,
by and large.
And
Korea? It is a war zone, after all, with some 38,000 American
soldiers here. Did the national security story predominate?
The national
security story did predominate, for understandable reasons,
I think, given all that was going on during my "watch,"
from the North South summit to, Evil Axis, to the nuclear
materials crisis, and the dramatic shift in South Korean public
opinion.
I tried,
always, to pay attention to Korean politics, not through the
lens of the alliance, but on their own terms, and I tried
to do pure features as much as possible, too.
My big
frustration and regret is that while I became fluent in Japanese,
I never learned how to speak Korean. One works dutifully and
conscientiously at covering a country, and there are lots
of stories I can look back upon with pride, but one never
covers a country properly without being able to function in
the native language, at least at a basic functional level.
Koreans,
I think, resented this too, seeing the American diplomats
and the journalists sent there essentially as Japan retreads.
Japan's
press clubs are criticized for promoting self-censorship and
excessive collusion between the source and reporters. How
do you view them?
I think
of the press clubs as machines to prevent good journalism.
They are antithetical to really competitive reporting. By
the way, city hall or police headquarter press offices in
the States have an inhibiting effect on enterprise and digging
and original work, too, because they encourage a habit of
news handouts from the authorities, where every agency and
every reporter know he's get the same material and can sit
around waiting for it. Not everyone, fortunately, falls into
this kind of trap. Japanese press clubs go much further, inhibiting
and sometimes even sanctioning members who disturb the wa
and do original work.
Are
they justified on cultural grounds, like the Japanese are
groupist, or the clubs help prevent social instability that
results from sensationalized reporting?
I'm a
little suspicious of overarching cultural explanations. I
do feel, however, that the mainstream press in Japan has an
elitist feel to it; an insiders' clubbiness to it that probably
stems in part from class origins. The rulers and reporters
came up together in the same schools and identify with each
other. Look, for example, at the way the press by and large
buys into the government's arguments in favor of nuclear power.
It's almost like an elite consensus was formed, and almost
nobody wants to take a really hard run against it.
Who was it, Archimedes(?) who said give me a lever long enough
and I can throw the earth? Well, in Japan there doesn't seem
to be much of a limb to stand on for those who want to challenge
elite consensus. Either you are inside the big circle, or
you don't count.
What about with Korea? Was access to officials any
easier or harder in Seoul? Were they more candid?
I suffered some particular handicaps in Korea, starting with
the language, which I don't speak. I also didn't live there,
but rather visited often. It's not the same at all. Korea's
press system has inherited some of the worst traits of Japan's
system, along with even less cosmopolitanism. In everyday
news situations, the Japanese usually had someone for the
foreigner to talk to. The information might not have been
very meaty, but at least they'd take your call. In Korea that
often wasn't the case. That said, I witnessed the early phases
of the breakup of Korea's old press system, with the emergence
of the Internet, alternative papers, and civil society as
important alternative sources of news, and I was left with
an idea of greater flexibility in Korea (than Japan) and I
think ROK is on the road to becoming a very interesting information
society.
How
about at the non-official level, among regular folks?
Koreans,
to make a very broad generalization, often struck me as far
more approachable than Japanese.
The Japanese government and official organizations
stand accused of trying hard to manipulate Western journalists
with special access, charm offensive, fellowships and culture-based
theories that highlight Japan's positives. Were you "massaged,"
more so than would occur in the US?
Yes indeed.
I was wined and dined for weeks, no, for months, by Gaimusho
types in a way that made me uncomfortable from the very beginning.
They seemed to want three things: that I portray Japan sympathetically,
which is normal, if a bit naive (I don't approach any country
thinking in these terms); that I attend Gaimusho briefings,
which would have meant flattering their own image, but getting
very little work done in Japan; and finally, that I regard
them as the conduit of information or indeed spokesman for
all of Japan.
The relationship,
if one can call it that, broke down finally when I reported
during the Lucy Blackburne summer that Japan's sex industry
is huge and omnipresent. Gaimusho folks took strong exception.
Some time later, my case agent, meaning the man whose job
it was to stay on my case, called repeatedly to complain about
my coverage of Tuffy Rhodes thwarted home run record drive.
I finally told the man off, saying I failed to see the connection
between baseball and foreign policy. They stopped calling
(and inviting me to lunch.)
Korea
is apparently phasing out the clubs, but not Japan. Why is
Japan so determined to retain what Ivan Hall called the cartels
of the mind?
Corporatism,
wedded to the wa, a deep seated aversion to frontal, public
competition, a political system whose stability (and lead-like
qualities) owe much to the way the press works, and on and
on.
You
reported that Japan has chosen to "avert its eyes"
from its war guilt. This is a common refrain in the Western
press. But is Japan worse than, say, the Europeans in facing
what they did in Africa?
The problems are closely related. Westerners have not been
honest in owning up to their imperial history, nor to the
impact of colonialism or even post-colonialism. There is very
much a winners write history phenomenon at work here. Add
to that a penchant for the auto heroic mode, if I might create
a term on the fly, in Western thought. Our narratives posit
us, as Westerners, in the role of goodness and light, as the
positive motor in history, no matter how much blood or how
many tears were shed along the way. These are footnotes, ultimately,
especially when the blood involves the death of "savages."
This was the price of their salvation (by us). It's called
the white man's burden, I believe.
The Japanese didn't conquer anyone they can even remotely
pretend were savages, nor did they have the convenient racial
distinctions that existed between Europeans and Africans,
or other dark skinned people. This has created narrative difficulties
for the Japanese which are complicated by the fact that they
didn't win the war, and therefore didn't get to write any
histories, except those used in its secondary schools.
The Japanese position toward its imperial history is miserable,
and has been very costly to the country. It is a small beer
mentality that grows from longing for respect and produces
the opposite result.
In
Korea, local collaboration with Japan during the imperial
era is also a taboo, partly because so many collaborators
became powerful after 1945. Did you encounter Koreans avoiding
this or other subjects?
I don't know the literature very well on this in Korea, but
I had many conversations on this subject in Korea, and didn't
find it so difficult to discuss.
You
were upbeat overall on the online, citizens-participation
forum called OhMYNews in Korea. But it is often reproached
because anyone can declare himself a journalist and post biased
or shoddy work. Is it ironic that a NYT bureau chief would
like a news source with apparently minimum standards?
Standards are the fruit of practice, and over time I have
confidence they will rise in a society like Korea, with its
literacy, income and sophistication. I also don't see much
of an alternative, frankly. The marketplace will, I am fairly
confident, sort most of these things out. Shoddy papers will
have a hard time over time.
The
Korean media is supposedly very partisan, corrupt and inaccurate.
Japan has the press clubs and social taboos like discrimination
against the burakumin. Are Korean and Japanese journalists
doing more or less for democracy?
I don't
have a fixed view of partisan versus non-partisan press. The
European style press, where papers are identified loosely
or directly with parties seems to function pretty well, as
does ours. Not to say that either is perfect. I think Korea's
press has been a real engine of democratization in the last
several years. Japan's press isn't really so preoccupied with
democracy, as far as I can tell, which isn't to say that it
isn't an important element in Japan's democracy. This democracy
is, in my view, anemic, at best, and a big part of that owes
to the peculiarities of Japan's media.
Foreigners
in both countries insist that the media is nationalistic—hyping
trade pressure, foreigners' alleged crimes and historical
suffering, but not guilt. Is this your impression?
There's certainly a lot of this. I live in China now, as you
know, and I've become keenly aware that this is a phenomenon
with deep roots in this part of the world. I'd like to understand
it better.
The
American media stands reproached for not challenging the White
House's claims before the Iraq War, and US media ownership
is increasingly concentrated. Is the US media less likely
to pander to officials and public mores, or more likely to
escape corporate pressure in exposing a major advertizer?
The American media deserves a lot of criticism. Absolutely.
We've lost a lot of our grit and spunk and sometimes succumb
to the Japanese thing of seduction by power, or confusion
of roles, thinking of ourselves as part of the elite, rather
than as outsider looking in with as critical an eye as one
can muster. That said, I read the Washington Post this morning
on a flight to Japan, and the front page carried a lengthy
story about how that paper had failed to raise the right questions
before the Iraq war, and how the readers' , and nation's interest
had not been served.
This is, for me, a hopeful sign that the patient, though ill,
still has a fair amount of life in him.
